Monday, 18 February 2019

Magritte’s iconic painting of a man looking in a mirror,
reminds us
that the world we perceive is not real,
but rather constructed

Acore question of ontology, or theories about the nature of being and existence—and perhaps its most pressing question from a practical point of view—is which individuals or 'things' are really real. What truly exists? It seems that there are three broad possibilities:

material entities alone (which is materialism),

mental entities alone (which is idealism),

or both (which is dualism).

However it is very difficult, as the cognitive scientist Aaron Sloman has put it, to distinguish between ‘real existents’ and ‘useful fictions’—or for that matter, useless ones. As philosophy professor Simon Blackburn notes:

‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers bent on keeping a firm check on reality—among them matter, force, energy, causes, physical laws, space, time, possibilities, numbers, infinity, selves, freedom of the will, the will itself, desires, beliefs, identity, things, properties, society, language, and money.’

Intuitively, we feel that what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch—or perceive in any way with our senses—is real. Yet what are we to make of things we do not perceive—either because, momentarily, we find that they lie beyond our senses, or because they are what we call ‘constructs'—compound ideas which may lack empirical evidence?

The problem strikes close to home. Take the one hundred most commonly used nouns in English. The first on the list is ‘time’. You cannot see it or touch it or anything like that. The second is ‘year’. The same applies. The third on the list is ‘people’. Now here is something we can see and touch—at least when those people happen to be around. The fourth term, though, ‘way’, is both real and unreal. And so, depending on how we categorise these nouns, fully half of them may not be ‘real’ at all.

It would be helpful to start with the simplest distinction—namely that which we make between real things we experience directly, and real things we do not.Imagine that I am cycling down a narrow cycle track under some coconut palms. I see the world in front of me as I go—but do not see the world behind me. I saw it a moment ago—a thicket of breadfruit trees, and children playing. But I know that they are there. I saw them, heard them, smelled them. Besides, I could easily stop my bicycle now and look back to confirm it.

In what sense, then, are those things there, which are now behind me? After all, I do not directly perceive them.

We may conduct a simple thought experiment.

Imagine that, as I ride my bicycle under the coconut trees, we switch off my senses and freeze this moment in time. Without my senses, the perceived and the unperceived look largely the same in my brain—namely, arrangements of synapses in a vast network of neurons.

In my brain, then, there is little difference between the seen and the unseen (or the heard and the unheard, and so on). Both exist in the vast neural network which is or contains the mind. Everything, whether real or imaginary, ends up there. The question now is not so much whether my mind contains things perceived or unperceived. In the first case, my senses are activated; in the second, they are not—but in both cases, they are as real to me as anything possibly can be.

This becomes important now for the more vexing question as to how we are to understand constructs. There is more to riding my bicycle than what I see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. If there were not, I would be wobbling on my bicycle without anything left to orientate me:

Does this outing fit my purpose? Did I steal this bicycle? Do I need a passport here? Should I turn around now? And so on. None of these ‘surplus’ things—purpose, ownership, citizenship, and so on—is immediately real to me, yet all of them are vital. My mind is filled, not only with the things that I see, or saw a moment ago—but with many things which are in a sense unreal. One could say, things which are lacking empirical evidence, although in every case, they can be tested in some way.

Are these constructs real? In fact they are real—at least, as real as the coconut trees before me, and the breadfruit trees and the children behind me, given the fact that I arrange them, too, in my mind—each as a distinct concept with a unique label. As such, they do not fundamentally differ from those things which ‘exist’.

It would be wise for us to pause for a moment. We know well that we are capable, as human beings, of thinking of fictions which are not so. On the one hand, fictitious concepts—say magic spells, or the quintessence—on the other hand, fictitious entities—say the planet Vulcan, or fairies and gnomes. Sometimes, too, we believe that our fictions exist—or that they will exist at some time in the future.

Yet the separation of the real and the fictitious would seem to be fairly straightforward. ‘Real’ things correspond with the reality we perceive, while pure fictions do not. Does time therefore exist—or identity or society or any one of hundreds of thousands of constructs there are? Given that they correspond with the reality we perceive, we can only say yes.

The ultimate question is, does God exist? Given the right conditions, the answer to this, too, could be yes. The ‘right conditions’ for God’s existence would be threefold:

that he is not purely ideational

that the concept ‘God’ corresponds with the reality we perceive

and that this concept is not invoked arbitrarily.

Or put it this way—for God to exist, there needs to be something permanent in our experience which necessitates him.

Monday, 11 February 2019

The ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ is a classic example of game theory and a tool for decision-making, where two rational, independent players must choose between cooperation and conflict to arrive at what’s perceived as the best outcome. Central to the interactive nature of the game is that the payoff (optimal or otherwise) for any single player deliberating his or her decisions and the consequences of those decisions hinges on the strategies that the other player chooses to implement according to assumptions and rules.

The prisoner’s dilemma was the product of modeling work performed in 1950; however, it was the mathematician Albert Tucker who ultimately structured and named the thought experiment as we know it today. The standard description of the prisoner’s dilemma runs along these lines:

Two prisoners are being interrogated apart from one another for crimes they are believed to have committed jointly. Although officials have enough evidence to convict both suspects on the lesser of the two charges, they have insufficient evidence for a conviction on the more severe crime they’re suspected of. The prosecutor, therefore, simultaneously but separately offers each prisoner a plea deal. The deal offered is either to provide information adequate to convict the other suspect in an act of betrayal, or to remain silent and refuse to testify, this being in effect a form of continued cooperation with their fellow prisoner.

There are three ways the preceding situation may play out:

• If both prisoners refuse to talk about their involvement in the main crime — that is, they cooperate with each other — they will both serve only one year (for the lesser crime).

• If one prisoner refuses to talk, but his partner chooses to betray (implicate) the other regarding the main crime, the silent prisoner will be sentenced to three years while the testifying prisoner will be set free.

• If, instead, both suspects implicate each other, both will fetch a sentence of two years.

The thought experiment is supposed to illustrate that neither prisoner has faith that his accomplice will stay tight-lipped, so both prisoners cannot resist testifying, with the tantalising hope of going free. These supposedly rational prisoners therefore pursue their self-interest, implicating each other. But the result is that both prisoners end up serving two years instead of one year if both had remained mum.

The lessons of the prisoner’s dilemma have been applied to many real-life, non-zero-sum situations. In such situations, cooperation results in better outcomes for all parties than if each party single-mindedly chases his or her own interests (rather than mutual interest) in order misguidedly to gain advantage over the other. So, for example, individually self-interested decisions can lead to injurious consequences for all. There are many everyday instances of the dilemma playing out, cutting across diverse behavioural arenas, such as economics, politics, biology, psychology, sports, academia, business, commerce, the workplace, and more. I'll briefly describe one particular instance.

In international strategic positioning, one theory assumes that all states ultimately compete rather than cooperate, their decisions reflecting rational self-interest to acquire advantage. For example, during the seventy-year Cold War, the phalanxes of NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced three options:

• Both sides endlessly scramble to deploy ever-more-advanced nuclear and conventional weapons to protect themselves and menace others, this being a policy with enormous, hard-to-sustain economic cost;

• One side greatly expands and enhances its forces while the other side doesn’t, the latter fearing betrayal and placing itself in peril while, on the upside, conserving its economic resources;

• Or both sides agree to disarm, thus reducing the probability of war while both avoid the massive expense of highly robust militaries.

It seems that the last of these choices, cooperation, would have led to the most desirable shared outcome; however, the delusion of ‘rational self-interest’ — doggedly pursuing individual reward — led both alliances to arm to the teeth, escalating the chance of conflict while hugely taxing both economies. Eventual arms-control agreements, though shaky and often tested, attempted to showcase cooperation, albeit fed by acute wariness: to keep a first-strike advantage out of the opposition’s hands.

The fragility of such agreements has been evident recently, in the fraught pursuit of arms control between the West and North Korea (with an already-existing nuclear arsenal) and the West and Iran (with an incipient capability, along with a presumably quick breakout to deployed nuclear weapons). In prisoner’s dilemma fashion, the resultant policies have reflected rational self-interest more so than cooperation, goaded by various motivators:

• Distrust over intent and betrayal, such as ‘regime change’;

• Anxiety over cheating and existential threats;

• Incendiary rhetoric threatening obliteration;

• The honest-to-goodness objectives that skulk below the public pronouncements;

Thus far, outcomes, such as they are, have mirrored these dynamics of distrust and antagonism, stemming from what is sometimes referred to as the Hobbesian trap, where parties default to tit-for-tat parrying over non-cooperative prisoner’s dilemma strategies.

Few circumstances, however, quite rise to the level of conforming to the idealism captured by John Rawls’s assertion that:

‘The hazards of the generalized prisoner’s dilemma are removed by the match between the right and the good.’

Yet, the prisoner’s dilemma thought experiment does bear upon many real-life situations that decision-makers around the world tackle daily. Scenarios that reflect how the push–pull between cooperation and conflict, as well as outcomes and payoffs, become complex — the more so with multiple parties in play, as in the example of strategic defence just described.

Another case involves the environment and global measures to mitigate serious threats emanating from climate change, as well as from the dilated timeline for halting or slowing the trajectory of that change. The key goal being to yield benefits shared across national borders. The self-serving interests so often associated with prisoner’s dilemma thinking — and the assumption that other countries will shoulder the burden of changing policies that harm the environment — might result in even developed nations keeping performance targets easy.

The purpose would be to protect themselves from social and economic disruption, as well as not to be taken advantage of in, say, lowering pollutants. Meanwhile, yet other countries may silently breach the Paris climate accord and the agreements reached recently in Katowice, Poland — neither of which arguably provides adequate confidence in the ‘fair play’ of others, provides sufficient metrics and accountability, proves demonstrably enforceable, or meaningfully disincentivises cheating.

Despite, therefore, the apparent win–win payoff that can stem from cooperation, from focus on mutual interests, and from trust-building, the strategic application of the prisoner’s dilemma in seeking maximum payoffs may still lead to parties succumbing to the myopic illusion of advantaged self-interest, and the delusion of being able to avoid incurring costs as a consequence.

Monday, 4 February 2019

'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted byThomas Scarborough

Asignpost on a public road in South Africa’s remote Suurveld. What stood out for me immediately was the letter ‘O’. The signmaker, a long time ago, clearly made a better job of the ‘O’s than the other letters. Some day, I thought, one may make out little more than the ‘O’s.

Great men and women of the past left our civilisation with vital signposts: the rule of law, universal suffrage, equal rights, and more. Some of their signposts are no longer clearly seen, nor are the reasons why they put them there. How well are our signposts made today, for tomorrow?

Monday, 28 January 2019

I’m a Platonist. Well, at least insofar as how mathematics is presumed ‘discovered’ and, in its being so, serves as the basis of reality. Mathematics, as the mother tongue of the sciences, is about how, on one important epistemological level, humankind seeks to understand the universe. To put this into context, the American physicist Eugene Wigner published a paper in 1960 whose title even referred to the ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics, before trying to explain why it might be so. His English contemporary, Paul Dirac, dared to go a step farther, declaring, in a phrase with a theological and celestial ring, that ‘God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world’. All of which leads us to this consequential question: Is mathematics invented or discovered, and does mathematics underpin universal reality?

‘In every department of physical science, there is only so much science … as there is mathematics’ — Immanuel Kant

If mathematics is simply a tool of humanity that happens to align with and helps to describe the natural laws and organisation of the universe, then one might say that mathematics is invented. As such, math is an abstraction that reduces to mental constructs, expressed through globally agreed-upon symbols. In this capacity, these constructs serve — in the complex realm of human cognition and imagination — as a convenient expression of our reasoning and logic, to better grasp the natural world. According to this ‘anti-realist’ school of thought, it is through our probing that we observe the universe and that we then build mathematical formulae in order to describe what we see. Isaac Newton, for example, developed calculus to explain such things as the acceleration of objects and planetary orbits. Mathematicians sometimes refine their formulae later, to increasingly conform to what scientists learn about the universe over time. Another way to put it is that anti-realist theory is saying that without humankind around, mathematics would not exist, either. Yet, the flaw in this paradigm is that it leaves the foundation of reality unstated. It doesn’t meet Galileo’s incisive and ponderable observation that:

‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.’

If, however, mathematics is regarded as the unshakably fundamental basis of the universe — whereby it acts as the native language of everything (embodying universal truths) — then humanity’s role becomes to discover the underlying numbers, equations, and axioms. According to this view, mathematics is intrinsic to nature and provides the building blocks — both proximate and ultimate — of the entire universe. An example consists of that part of the mathematics of Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicting the existence of ‘gravitational waves’; the presence of these waves would not be proven empirically until this century, through advanced technology and techniques. Per this ‘Platonic’ school of thought, the numbers and relationships associated with mathematics would nonetheless still exist, describing phenomena and governing how they interrelate, bringing a semblance of order to the universe — a math-based universe that would exist even absent humankind. After all, this underlying mathematics existed before humans arrived upon the scene — awaiting our discovery — and this mathematics will persist long after us.

If this Platonic theory is the correct way to look at reality, as I believe it is, then it’s worth taking the issue to the next level: the unique role of mathematics in formulating truth and serving as the underlying reality of the universe — both quantitative and qualitative. As Aristotle summed it up, the ‘principles of mathematics are the principles of all things’. Aristotle’s broad stroke foreshadowed the possibility of what millennia later became known in the mathematical and science world as a ‘theory of everything’, unifying all forces, including the still-defiant unification of quantum mechanics and relativity.

As the Swedish-American cosmologist Max Tegmark provocatively put it, ‘There is only mathematics; that is all that exists’ — an unmistakably monist perspective. He colorfully goes on:

‘We all live in a gigantic mathematical object — one that’s more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today’s most advanced physics theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical— including you.’

The point is that mathematics doesn’t just provide ‘models’ of physical, qualitative, and relational reality; as Descartes suspected centuries ago, mathematics is reality.

Mathematics thus doesn’t care, if you will, what one might ‘believe’; it dispassionately performs its substratum role, regardless. The more we discover the universe’s mathematical basis, the more we build on an increasingly robust, accurate understanding of universal truths, and get ever nearer to an uncannily precise, clear window onto all reality — foundational to the universe.

In this role, mathematics has enormous predictive capabilities that pave the way to its inexhaustibly revealing reality. An example is the mathematical hypothesis stating that a particular fundamental particle exists whose field is responsible for the existence of mass. The particle was theoretically predicted, in mathematical form, in the 1960s by British physicist Peter Higgs. Existence of the particle — named the Higgs boson — was confirmed by tests some fifty-plus years later. Likewise, Fermat’s famous last theorem, conjectured in 1637, was not proven mathematically until some 360 years later, in 1994 — yet the ‘truth value’ of the theorem nonetheless existed all along.

Underlying this discussion is the unsurprising observation by the early-20th-century philosopher Edmund Husserl, who noted, in understated fashion, that ‘Experience by itself is not science’ — while elsewhere his referring to ‘the profusion of insights’ that could be obtained from mathematical research. That process is one of discovery. Discovery, that is, of things that are true, even if we had not hitherto known them to be so. The ‘profusion of insights’ obtained in that mathematical manner renders a method that is complete and consistent enough to direct us to a category of understanding whereby all reality is mathematical reality.

Monday, 21 January 2019

The Way to Root out Evil?Thought reading: curing human nature with instinct

Why have the thousands of years of moral efforts,
– Religion, education, and the rule of law –
Not cured the human evil of harming others for gain?
Because faith, reason and justice, powerful as they are,
Cannot outdo the ultimate selfishness of human nature.
Kant said, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, No straight thing was ever made.’

But, what is more fundamental is human instinct –
The self-preservation based only on physiology.
As thoughts are invisible, one can deceive –
One’s evil intentions may not do harm to oneself,
Hence permitted by instinct, hence possible for evil.

If, by a ‘thought-reader’, thoughts become visible,
Any intention to harm others would harm oneself,
Hence prevented by instinct, hence impossible for evil.

Whether thoughts are visible is, in fact, a moral valve,
Controlling whether there is the possibility of evil.The invisibility of thought = the possibility of evil;The visibility of thought = the impossibility of evil.
To make thoughts visible makes morality an instinct,
And men “good men” who can’t be bad.

As the invisibility of thought is the cause of evil,
The truly effective way to root-out evil
Is not the moral classics from Plato to Marx,
But seeing thoughts, to cure human nature with instinct.
Instinct is water, to serve or flood depending on the river.
Only in the canal of truthfulness dredged by the machine,
Can the boat of coexistence sail freely with human dynamics.

* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

Monday, 14 January 2019

Monogamy has failed -- by all reasonable metrics -– and we have been unwilling to ask monogamy the hard questions. The divorce rate amongst Baby Boomers is pushing upward of 50% and if one includes the more than 30% of married men and women who will succumb to secret dalliance at some point, the rate is way worse than that.

If 50% of an investment fund turned belly up or half the airplanes that took off each day crashed and burned, we would consider them intrinsically flawed and publicly unsafe. According to Psychology Today, ‘... in the U.S. 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. It is now becoming unusual to find two people who remain married to each other for their entire lives.

The word monogamy itself has changed. Just a few decades ago it described the practice of marrying only once during a lifetime. Now it is also used to describes the practice of having only one sexual partner at any given time (as per the definition in the Oxford Dictionary). Anyway, the title ‘monogamous’ is often simply a veneer hiding a complex compromise of temptation, emotional affairs, suppressed regret and hidden unfaithfulness.

Young people are often misled into thinking that marriage can provide them with a lifetime of sexual fulfillment and emotional security – and invariably hit a wall of rude awakening when reality falls short of their expectations and temptation redefines their truth. Even when we verbally advocate monogamy, in reality we tend to deviate from it. And so traditional family structures are being challenged on many fronts. Where relationships were historically based on a sense of religious or social obligation, they are now more apt to be an expression of self-authentication. And the ‘thou shalt not’ from the pulpit has failed to stem this social shift from a ‘theocentric’ or family-centric worldview to one that is egocentric.

As the deception and pain in cheating are still recognised as distasteful and immoral (in the US military adultery is still criminal), social creativity has sought ethical alternatives to infidelity -- and consequently, there has been a commensurate rise in non-traditional relationships. We are seeing a social and cultural evolution taking place regarding the kinds of relationships men and women seek, and what they find fulfilling. It is not uncommon to meet people who have been married two or three times, or more.

As the deception and pain in cheating is still recognised as distasteful and immoral (in the US military adultery is still criminal), social creativity has sought ethical alternatives to infidelity – and consequently, there has been a commensurate rise in non-traditional relationships. We are seeing a social and cultural evolution taking place regarding the kinds of relationships men and women seek, and what they find fulfilling.

Homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual, polyamory, polyfidelity, polysensual, open relationships, monogamish (mostly monogamous) relationships, swinging, kinky, the lifestyle, serial monogamy and consensual non-monogamy and many others have all become terms we must navigate as we talk intelligently about healthy consensual adult relationships. While most of these relational constructs are still invisible legally, they are undeniably here to stay socially. For example, one Canadian based ‘kink’ websites boasts over seven million members.

Should we abandon monogamy as a great idea whose season has come and gone? What is the new normal? Is there even such a thing as normal any more? We must individually explore where we fit into (or do not fit into) these new social constructs. Ought polyamory, serial monogamy or consensual non-monogamy be recognised as an ‘orientation’ in the same way that homosexuality or lesbianism are?

Ann Tweedy, of Hamline University School of Law recently explained why we may speak of orientation. ‘Sexual orientation,’ she says, ‘is defined as attraction to either the same sex, the opposite sex or both sexes – but it could be broadened to include other sexual preferences that are entwined with identity.’ These alternatives must be addressed as we forge the social pathway forwards. And possible even deeper, we must understand why traditional monogamy is unravelling, what to do with this antiquated system that was the ‘gold standard’ of society, and how to engage the new norms as we live in the real world.

What then has caused the ‘gold standard’ to topple? What has caused this shift, and how should we respond? What is bringing monogamy to its knees? An in depth look at the cause reaches beyond the limitations of this post -- but here are considerations to start the discussion.

Fundamental to understanding our change in behavior surely must be a dialogue about our shifting roles. The marketplace has now been enriched by equality – and with that, sexual temptations and opportunities proliferate for both sexes. Women have come of age and emerged as equal vyers for their share of the economic pie. We work more and travel more – and are connected to and are communicating with others more. On top of that the media bombard our sensual appetites consistently – stimulation overload. And exhaustion!

Online pornography and internet dating have not served traditional structures well. Ashley Maddison, a ‘married dating site’, boasts almost eight million members with about sixteen thousand sign-ups every day – half of whom are women.

It is said that modern technology has fostered an immediate gratification mindset – and if sexual appetite and opportunity is out there – why not? Social conservatism – as espoused by the religious front – is losing traction, even amongst the faithful, as society embraces a more open mindset. And it seems we are not having affairs as much because we are looking for someone else as much as we are looking to authenticate ourselves.

Yet interestingly, the one thing that has not changed -- that threads itself consistently through every style, type and description of relationship -- is the destructive power of deception and the fundamental need for trust. It seems no matter what your preference of relationship structure is – monogamy or otherwise – deception is still the killer and cheating is still cheating. Yes, the structure and context of relationships may be changing. How we understand our needs and the creative ways we give expression to our sexuality may be shifting, but fundamentally – we are still the same. We still look for relationships we can trust, and people we can enjoy the richness of mutual connection and exploration with. We still find satisfaction in the consistency of respect. Monogamy may have fallen on hard days – but faithfulness has not.

Things might look a bit disorientating in this picture. Who’s going where? All move and get blocked. To unblock, one needs movement. But where does movement occur? When there is space. And is the suggestion of space not primarily evoked by the idea of chaos?

Back to the picture above. All were moving to a point that ultimately leads into an impasse. ‘The road’ no longer exists, so to speak. Symbolically, this image reflects the Taoist notion that the essence of life consists in never stopping the flow, for no point will ever reward us.
Then perhaps chaos is chaotic only by a misconception about space?

Monday, 31 December 2018

Well, how do you measure the speed of light - and thus check that everything is observing this ‘universal speed limit’? Seven years ago, the closing months of 2011 saw much excitement in sciencey circles with the highly mediatized announcement that researchers at CERN, the world's most expensive physics laboratory, had detected sub-atomic particles apparently travelling faster than the speed of light. This, the papers assured us, was in defiance of Einstein and all the rules of relativity. Yet the plain ‘fact’ of the matter is that the speed of light is not magically ‘out there’ but merely a human convention. In a relativistic universe, how could it be otherwise?

Here the point is put nicely by Burt Jordaan in a blog posting of January 25, 2010. Burt writes:

‘In order to measure any one-way velocity, we essentially need two clocks: one at the start and one at the end. Obviously, the two clocks need to be synchronized and run at the same rate (and to be sure, they must not be moving relative to each other and also be at the same gravitational potential). Yet we reasonably assume that the two clocks run at the same rate, at least close enough for all practical purposes. Now we need to synchronize the two clocks to read the same at the same moment. How is this done?

In his 1905 paper on Special Relativity, Einstein says: “We have not defined a common ‘time’ for A and B, for the latter cannot be defined at all unless we establish by definition that the ‘time’ required by light to travel from A to B equals the ‘time’ it requires to travel from B to A”.

One can reasonably read Einstein's ‘by definition’ as ‘by convention’. Using Einstein’s convention to set the distant clock at a known distance, call it ‘D’, in empty space, we send a light signal at (say) time zero and when the distant clock detects the signal, it sets its time to D/c sec (the light travel time), where c is the standard speed of light in vacuum.

Now we can measure the speed of any object moving between the two clocks. We can also use the two clocks to measure the one-way speed of light, but we are obviously guaranteed to always get c. In this sense, we get the speed of any object only relative to c and not absolutely. In this way, the one-way speed of light is a convention, depending on the convention for clock synchronization."

Burt concludes by observing that there is a general belief system prevailing in physics that ‘whatever is
known exists and rest is non-existent’. It is because of this belief system that scientists tend to fill these existence-nonexistence gaps by cofficients. Yet there can be
much more existent and important entities quite apart from the usual quantitites of space and time which
physicist are led to ignore. This attitude is the reason that the existence of Dark Matter was unimaginable for four hundred years. As to the spped of light itslef, Burt says explicitly that he cannot understand
why Einstein established a ‘religion of special abilities and qualities’ for light. Specifcally, he objects tha even though there are ways to measure the speed of light, there is
no reason to believe that nothing can travel faster.

Our own correspondent, Muneeb Faiq, took up the issue for Pi too. Here he offers a thought experiment which again shows the arbitariness of the ‘speed of light’.

‘In fact, there is a lot of confusion about the harmony between the classical and quantum definitions of speed.If both quantum speed and classical speed mean the same then a very interesting difficulty comes to the front.

Suppose there exists only one body in the universe. Just a single point mass and space. Is it at rest or in motion? If, however, there come out two photons of light moving parallel to each other. What speed are they moving at? If an observor is stationed on the point mass, then both the photons are moving with the velocity of light. Suppose, all of a sudden, the point mass ceases to exist. Now there are two photons moving with same speed parallel to each other. Nothing else exists except space. Are these two photons moving now because they are at same position in relation to each other which will be defined as the state of rest.

It is interesting to note that before the point mass existed, the two photons were moving with the velocity of light. Now since the point mass has ceased to exist but nothing changed about the photons, they are not supposed to be moving now even if they are moving with the same previous speed.’

Tuesday, 25 December 2018

On January 20, 2010, at 10:23 (Oxford time, we may suppose), thousands
of brilliant minds tried to prove, by guzzling homeopathy pills, that
homeopathic remedies could not kill people, and thus that homeopathy
doesn't work (and that "there's nothing in it"). A magnificient
demonstration of public adherence to the scientific method!

Reposted and updated from Pi Alpha. Edited by Martin Cohen with original research by Perig Gouanvic

“The misrepresentations of history presented by Holocaust deniers and other pseudo-historians are very similar in nature to the misrepresentations of natural science promoted by creationists and homeopaths. ... we find a wide variety of movements and doctrines, such as creationism, astrology, homeopathy, and Holocaust denialism that are in conflict with results and methods that are generally accepted in the community of knowledge disciplines. ”

- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Mass Suicide of Homeopathy Skeptics

Almost all of the systematic reviews in conventional journals start on a skeptical note. Indeed, nine out of ten of the articles begin with a statement that questions the scientific plausibility of homeopathy. Some of the articles use relatively strong language to make the point. For example, one by ‘Ernst and Pittler’ suggests that it is the use of ‘highly diluted material that overtly flies in the face of science and has caused homeopathy to be regarded as placebo therapy at best and quackery at worst’.

But to get a good sense of what the masses, including those who make up ‘the scientific consensus’, really think, Wikipedia is a passable indicator. Wikipedians, amongst them, in such articles, we find watchdogs of ‘reason’, including various hired professionals from the ‘Public Understanding of Science’ (and their trusted mercenaries) love to indulge in this dusty old strawman argument:

‘a 12C [homeopathic] solution is equivalent to a 'pinch of salt in both the North and South Atlantic Oceans'... One third of a drop of some original substance diluted into all the water on earth would produce a remedy with a concentration of about 13C.’

This is a stunning demonstration of the lack of intelligence not only of the ‘scientific consensus’, but of the democratic process of knowledge itself. And leading the process is Wikipedia, which turns donkeys into horses on a daily basis, as Socrates would say, while in the background is the poor state of debate between the Orthodoxy and the scientists and philosophers who are trying to make sense of homeopathy. Hahnemann spoke about a ‘forc’ that remained after dilutions and succussions, but pseudoskeptics have kept making the same strawman argument for the last 200 years.

The reality is that Hahnemann wrote a great deal and never shied away from philosophical questions. He argues:

‘A substance divided into ever so many parts must still contain in its smallest conceivable parts always some of this substance, and that the smallest conceivable part does not cease to be some of this substance and cannot possibly become nothing; - let them, if they are capable of being taught, hear from natural philosophers that there are enormously, powerful things (forces) which are perfectly destitute of weight.’

You may not agree, but it is not foolish stuff. Indeed, these days, the ‘homeopathic force’, for instance, could be described in a context of systems biology.

According to Ilya Prigogine, a Russian-born Belgian chemist best known for his definition of dissipative structures ‘and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium’(work that led him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977), in the domain of deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the ‘present’, which follows a determined ‘past’ and precedes an undetermined ‘future’. Instead, all of time is simply a given, with the future just as determined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life.

This applies especially well to homeopathy. Orthodox scientists evaluate homeopathy through the lens of the results (it’s only water/alcohol!) and tirelessly calculate oceanographic metaphors to deride what they believe is homeopathy, oblivious of the fact that dilution is conceived as a process leading to a change in the way the molecules of the solvent behave together — a change in the structure of water and a concurrent change in the forces likely to make these structures possible.

Brian Josephson, Nobel laureate of physics, has commented on a typical debunking exercise made by the New Scientist journal that:

‘criticisms [of homeopathy] centred around the vanishingly small number of solute molecules present in a solution after it has been repeatedly diluted are beside the point, since advocates of homeopathic remedies attribute their effects not to molecules present in the water, but to modifications of the water's structure. Simple-minded analysis may suggest that water, being a fluid, cannot have a structure of the kind that such a picture would demand. But cases such as that of liquid crystals, which while flowing like an ordinary fluid can maintain an ordered structure over macroscopic distances, show the limitations of such ways of thinking. There have not, to the best of my knowledge, been any refutations of homeopathy that remain valid after this particular point is taken into account.’

The particular homeopathic claim that water can ‘remember’ substances with which it has been in contact, and that such memory might be mediated by hydrogen bonds has also been criticised, typically on theoretical grounds. Many such arguments involve the short duration of individual hydrogen bonds in liquid water ( which is about a picosecond).

However, it is not to be assumed that the mesoscale structure of water must change on the same time scale. For example, in ice, hydrogen bonds are also very shortlived but an ice sculpture can ‘remember’ its shape over extended periods. (Here our essay assumes a suitbly seasonal feel - Editor.) On a smaller scale, cation hydrates are commonly described with particular structure (for example, the octahedral Na+(H2O)6 ion) even though the individual water molecules making up such structures have very brief residence times (measured in microseconds).

Such arguments ignore the fact that the behaviour of a large population of water molecules may be retained even if that of individual molecules is constantly changing, just as a wave can cross an ocean, remaining a wave although its molecular content is continuously changing.

Evidence denying the long life of water clusters is mostly based on computer simulations but these cover only nanoseconds of simulated time. Such short periods are insufficient to show longer temporal relationships, for example those produced by oscillating reactions. They also involve relatively few water molecules and small (nanometre) dimensions, insufficient to show mesoscale (micron) effects. In short, they use models of the water molecule whose predictions correspond poorly to the real properties of water.

Certain 'memory' effects in water are well established and uncontroversial: for instance the formation of clathrate hydrates from aqueous solutions whereby previously frozen clathrates within the solution, when subsequently melted, predispose later to more rapid clathrate formation. This is explained by the presence of nanobubbles, extended chain silicates or induced clathrate initiators.

Can a homeopathic remedy work if it contains none of the original curative substance?

John Dalton (1776 - 1844) was able to estimate relative atomic masses of various molecules, the smallest unit that a chemical can exist in without losing its identity. His values were soon improved by Amadeo Avogadro (1776 - 1856), in 1811. Avogadro made the very important proposal that the volume of a gas (strictly, of an ideal gas ) is proportional to the number of atoms or molecules that are present. Hence, the relative molecular mass of a gas can be calculated from the mass of a sample of known volume. BUT neither Avogadro nor Dalton knew how many molecules there were in a given mass of a substance. This is historically significant because it means that, although Hahnemann realised that there was a limit to the dilutions that could be used, he had no way of knowing what that limit was. An historical curiousity - or confirmation of the importance of the homeopathic principle? - is the fact that Darwin tested out ultrahigh dilutions on carnivorous plants. In Insectivorous Plants (1875) he writes:

‘The reader will best realize this degree of dilution by remembering that 5,000 ounces would more than fill a thirty-one gallon cask [barrel]; and that to this large body of water one grain of the salt was added; only half a drachm, or thirty minims, of the solution being poured over a leaf. Yet this amount sufficed to cause the inflection of almost every tentacle, and often the blade of the leaf. … My results were for a long time incredible, even to myself, and I anxiously sought for every source of error. … The observations were repeated during several years. Two of my sons, who were as incredulous as myself, compared several lots of leaves simultaneously immersed in the weaker solutions and in water, and declared that there could be no doubt about the difference in their appearance. … In fact every time that we perceive an odor, we have evidence that infinitely smaller particles act on our nerves.’

But we have to be careful; homeopathy was not the declared, explicit, subject of this text, although it may have been an underlying riddle for Darwin (we know that he visited an homeopath, out of despair about his condition, and felt better after).

In any case, in the Sixth edition of Hahnemann's Organon, which is the ‘Bible’ for practising homeopaths, Hahnmann explicitly moves beyond ‘physical’ cause and effect into the mystical world of mesmerism - or healing by the mystical agency of the so-called vital force (popular at the time and perhaps similar to the notion of chi in Chinese medicine.)

‘I find it necessary to allude here to animal magnetism, as it is termed, or rather mesmerism (as it should be called, out of gratitude to Mesmer, its first founder), which differs so much in its nature from all other therapeutic agents.

This curative power, often so stupidly denied, which streams upon a patient by the contact of a well-intentioned person powerfully exerting his will, either acts homoeopathically, by the production of symptoms similar to those of the diseased state to be cured; and for this purpose a single pass made, without much exertion of the will, with the palms of the hands not too slowly from the top of the head downwards over the body to the tips of the toes, is serviceable in, for instance, uterine haemorrhages, even in the last stage when death seems approaching; or it is useful by distributing the vital force uniformly throughout the organism, when it is in abnormal excess in one part and deficient in other parts, for example, in rush of blood to the head and sleepless, anxious restlessness of weakly persons, etc., by means of a similar, single, but somewhat stronger pass; or for the immediate communication and restoration of the vital force to some one weakened part or to the whole organism, - an object that cannot be attained so certainly and with so little interference with the other medicinal treatment by any other agent besides mesmerism.’

According to the German newspaper Bild, a seventh edition of the Organon was recently unearthed in his native Germany, and this reveals that the doctor had continued his work on replacing dilutions with mesmerism and had completed experiments on the resuscitation of dead dogs. Alas, as the newspaper puts it, ‘He died shortly afterwards.’

The bottom line is that homeopathic dilution has not been shown o work, but nor yet has it been shown to be impossible. Some will say ‘well, you cannot prove a negative’ which may be true, but clearly the history of science is of things that people rejected as impossible becoming accepted in the light on new and more sophisticated understandings. The same could yet be said for the mystery of homeopathic dilution.

Monday, 17 December 2018

In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’, Alice speaks to a tiger lily—and is quite astonished when it speaks back to her. She remarks that she has never heard flowers speak before—upon which the tiger lily explains that the flowerbeds are made too soft, which keeps them always asleep.

Metaphorically, when you are embedded in a language, you have become acquainted to the connotations of that language alone—and usually when you are in it, you will not be in a position to see it. Each of us is born within a pre-existent conceptual scheme, and each of us develops a language of a specific kind. The way we see the world depends on how we are endorsed by this language.

What happens to Alice in her encounters in Wonderland is that she is forced to wonder about the appropriateness of her way of thinking—and this comes about, to a large extent, through miscommunication.

The language which each of us holds, upholds within itself the truth of itself—there is an explanatory force which is implicit in the language we know—but it is not therefore more true. When a misunderstanding occurs, it may well represent, not an isolated linguistic niggle, but a difference between our signifying schemes, in which my premeditation of meaning cannot be confirmed. Something is added to my habitual use of language. And then, I may react like Alice:

‘How am I to get in?’ asked Alice again in a louder tone. ‘Are you to get in at all?’ said the Foot-man. ‘That’s the first question, you know.’ ‘Oh, there’s no use in talking to him,’ said Alice desperately: ‘he’s perfectly idiotic!’ And she opened the door and went in.*

What we believe as true, is always internal to a conceptualized signifying scheme. Thus when we correct misunderstandings, we admit to cohere to a subjective scheme. With 7.53 billion people living, to think that understanding is something in which we find only isolated linguistic niggles, creates a fairly fragile support for understanding. For where comprehension lacks is not that obvious, if we do not question where the boundaries for our intentionality of meaning have been put within our own conceptualising scheme.

Miscommunication thus highlights the confusion that is created within our understanding when the demand is to understand differently. As soon as these connotations are questioned, not the language we use is put at stake but how we know life, and then we ourselves are put at stake! When you are embedded in a preferred language, you also admit to live a preferred reality.

But is not our language controlled by an external reality? In fact as soon as we name our reality, we only secure the reality of a phenomenon with language, but not the phenomenon itself. With language we cut life into pieces, and afterwards think that that reality is made out of different worlds, a real one and an unreal one. But no, the word something, either indicating something real or unreal is only determined in psycho-linguistic terms.

'But I'm not a serpent, I tell you!' said Alice. 'I'm a — I'm a — 'Well! What are you?' said the Pigeon. 'I can see you're trying to invent something!' 'I — I'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.**

This is how we are able to understand stories—the adventures of Alice being one example. In fiction we can accept the ‘unreal’, while in daily life we uphold an idea of what it means to conform to ‘the real’. We think then that this is altogether quite sensible. But language is enclosed within itself. Language is uniquely language. So we can fall asleep, as it were, in the flowerbed of a story.

Both miscommunication and ‘unreal’ stories share this in common: when we deconstruct their linguistic norms, we can see that neither is as fictive or erroneous as we would like to believe. Nor do stories pertain to some mysterious other language or other world. When we recognise how we are entangled in language, we can also recognise how both stories and miscommunication have a hard time affirming their reality, or reason its own unreality.

But there is in all this a hidden serendipity. Once we understand how our comprehension works—above all that misunderstanding requires a shift in our entire conceptual scheme, we may see it as a precious gift, enabling us truly to step back from a fixed pattern of thinking, and to recognise our own subjectivity:

‘Visit either you like, they’re both mad,’ [said the Cat]. ‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’***

Monday, 10 December 2018

Plastic, Pachyderms* and Profit In Search of Solutions for a Sustainable Future

Posted by Matthew Edward Scarborough and Lina Scarborough

Before the advent of rifle-armed hunters, the African continent was home to tens of millions of elephants. By 1920 however, there are estimated to have been less than two hundred of them left in all of South Africa. Fast-forward to today, when there are once more thriving (though increasingly poached) populations of thousands of elephants. What saved elephants from extinction? A growing concern for the environment? The creation of national parks? Yes … but not only. There is also a more unexpected reason for elephants doing much better today: Materials Science.

A century ago, ivory was used in all manner of household objects: piano keys, combs, chess-pieces, bracelets, buttons and billiard-balls. Billiard-balls in particular were one of the main causes and largest culprits for the decline in elephant populations: in Sri Lanka in particular, elephant populations were decimated in order to produce the much sought-after billiard-balls. Fashionable as ivory was, it soon became apparent that demand well exceeded supply. In 1907 however, a scientist developed a substance named Bakelite: a hard, durable, ivory-like plastic which can now be found in many everyday objects. But since then plastics have also become ubiquitous -- we use them daily to the point that escaping plastic feels impossible.

This is where you fit into the challenge.

Today no one would dream of shooting an elephant to make a piano keyboard -- and it was ironically plastic that helped save the elephant. It is now high time we changed our behaviour once again, as plastic itself becomes a threat to the environment and its flora and fauna.

But is plastic really so bad?

Speak to our friend Talitha Noble, who works at the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town. She is a marine biologist who spends most days rehabilitating turtles stranded on our South African beaches -- loggerhead and leatherback, green, the petite olive ridley and hawksbill turtles, all of which wash up on our shores in a poor state. It is not uncommon to find plastics (especially micro-plastics) being passed from their digestive systems.

Although Talitha is a dispassionate scientist, it’s hard not to develop an attachment to individual turtles. One turtle in particular – called Bob, arrived at the aquarium in a poor condition. He wasn’t eating or diving, tragically developed meningitis, brain damage, and even went partially blind. After being in rehabilitation for several months he passed a lot of plastic, including the remains of bags and a balloon. When he passed the plastic, it was a turning-point in his recovery. Bob is now a poster-child for plastic awareness, but there are countless other turtles: a large loggerhead called Noci even had a piece of plastic in his tummy which had travelled all the way from China.

The convenience of plastic, unfortunately, often trumps values. Those tools of convenience bear the flip-side of potentially being tools of mass destruction, fuelled by brand and consumer apathy. We can’t wait for the eventual launch of the next big materials invention. Act now by using the available alternatives.

For example, re-usable and handy mesh bags are easily bought online, or from modern eco-friendly shops. It doesn’t take much effort to purchase and keep one’s own re-usable cloth bags in the car, in comparison to the process it takes to make plastic, and then deal with its catastrophic consequences.

Plastics are derived from either crude oil or natural gasses which, geologically-speaking, took millions of years of form. We consumers in contrast typically use said plastic for the relatively short time taken from the grocery shop to our homes, before throwing the plastic packets and styrofoam boxes away for good.

But being thrown out is far from the end of your plastic. Plastic on the tops of landfills are often carried far away by the wind. If it doesn’t end up wafting up and down your street or in the stomach of an animal, it’ll evntually go into the ground, even if it is recycled (recycling can only be done so many times before the recycled plastic too needs to be discarded). Trillions of tiny pieces of plastic (so-called micro-plastics) now fill our oceans and have infiltrated our food-chains, causing massive (if largely unseen) ecological damage. So the best way to curb single-use plastic pollution is therefore to reduce your personal plastic consumption in the first place.

Yet all the research in the world might not be powerful enough to change our collective consumer psyche. It’s up to us individuals to put pressure on shops to adapt to the modern reality of wasted resources. It’s up to the shops to do their role to respond and offer initiatives and awareness. Together this mess was created, and together it must be fixed.

Consumers -- we must take the initiative and buy or make our own grocery bags for fruit and nuts, and cut the styrofoam out once and for all. I try to encourage the shopper next to me in line to do the same. Brand owners and supermarkets -- why not put up placards creating awareness so that consumers start bringing their own re-usable bags for loose fruits and nuts? Add a small surcharge on offering single-use plastics – as much as 50 cents often sways consumers, as it registers with them that there is a cost involved. If the costs are out of sight (such as the dead or injured marine animals somewhere out there), then it’s also out of mind.

All the knowledge in the world might not be powerful enough to change the consumer psyche. When all has been said, art and poetry may help to convey a sense of the bigger picture. In the poem A World Without Plastic, Stephen Katona writes:

It would be fantastic, If we stopped using plastic, And eased the world's pain, With a healthy food chain. Turtles would no longer gag, On a supermarket's bag.

We can choose change from today with things wrapped the right way:

Rethink the bag – ban the balloon – and bring your own bakkie#. Together we can have a sustainable future with much less plastic (and happy turtles!).

Notes

*Pronounced patchi-derms: A large mammal with thick skin, especially an elephant, rhinoceros, or hippopotamus.

#A South Africanism for an ice-cream box or similar re-usable container. And a bit about the authors:

Matthew is a Zoology PhD student at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, where he researches the evolution of extinct elephants and mammoths. Lina Scarborough (formerly Ufimtseva) is a project manager at a German language agency in Cape Town with an interest in linguistics and ecology (Lina and Matthew got married in June this year).

Monday, 3 December 2018

'Because
things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed
to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'Posted by Martin Cohen

Sabine Weiss Chairs, Paris, 1952

I like this simple image, to me a trompe l’oeil, or trick on the eye, although literally the phrase refers to things like those doorways to imaginary gardens painted on walls.

I managed to find out a little about the photographer in this case. Sabine Weiss, born in 1924 in Switzerland and still alive, living there although since 1995 a French citizen, is described as a representative of the ‘French Humanist photography
movement’ — which showcases ‘Les villes, la rue, l'autre.’

Ah, ‘the other’... The French do seem to always return to that theme.For these two iron frame chairs, ‘the other’ certainly lurks just behind them changing their sense and indeed ‘presence’.

The French Humanist photographers claim to document their surroundings through an unbiased and non-critical lens. A guide for one exhibiton explains that she is praised for making ‘full of light, making play with shadows and blurred areas’ and,
above all, for her ‘reconciliation with reality’.

‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, observed the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1922 book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. To that point, we might ask: How does language relate to the world? And, more particularly, does language shape human experience — our shared reality and our individual reality? Built into these questions is another — about how language connects mind and world, and in doing so arbitrates our experience of what’s around us.

At a fundamental level, words and ideas describe the world through things (people, horses, pomegranates), properties (purple, octagon, scratchy surface), relations (the moon is 384,000 kilometres from Earth, the flu virus infects millions of people globally, the calamari sits on her mezze plate), and abstractions (thought, value, meaning, belief). That is, language serves to create and aggregate knowledge, understanding, and experience. That’s broadly how we know what we know about reality. But language — the sounds made as people talk and the inscriptions made as they write — is more than just, say, a meta-tool for informational exchanges.

That is, people issue commands, share jokes, welcome visitors, pledge allegiances, pose questions, admonish, lie, explain feelings, threaten, share stories, exaggerate, sing, and so on. Body language (a suddenly raised eyebrow, perhaps) and tone (gruffness or ecstasy, perhaps) add an important layer. An observation by Willard Van Orman Quine, the 20th-century American philosopher, that ‘Language is a social art’, rightly captures this function of language in our lives. There’s a complex harmonising between what we infer and internalize about purported reality and the various kinds of things, properties, and relations that actually exist.

Language thus shapes our thoughts and changes how we think. The relation between thought (mind) and language is synergistic — that is, the combined effect of language and thought is greater than their separate effects. In this manner, a Chickasaw speaker, a Tagalog speaker, an Urdu speaker, a Russian speaker, and an English speaker perceive reality differently — the fundamental building blocks of which are words. As the British philosopher J.L. Austin noted:

‘Going back into the history of a word . . . we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done’.

The tie, we might say, between language and perceptions (‘pictures’ and ‘models’) — both concrete and abstract — of how reality, in all its nuance and complexity, plays out.

Correspondingly, the many subtle differences across the world’s roughly 7,000 languages — across vocabularies and other linguistic elements — frame and constrain the way we experience the world. That is, languages differ enough to lead to singularly dissimilar views of reality. Word choice, meaning (both denotation and connotation), syntax, metaphors, grammar, gender, figures of speech, correlation and causality, intent and expectation, and context all influence our perception of the world.

It is thus understandable, amidst this mix of languages’ ingredients, for the German-American philosopher Rudolf Carnap, writing in the mid-20th century, to have counseled, ‘Let us . . . be tolerant in permitting linguistic forms’. Whether despite or because of this mix, language directly influences culture, which in turn bears on how we talk and what we talk about. Cultural norms influence this process. Yet, notwithstanding the power of perceptions, there is a world independent of language — empirically knowable — even if external reality may not be independent of observation and measurement. Galaxies and microbes exist.

As one illustration where language intervenes upon reality, it has been pointed out that the Native American language Nootka has actions as its principal classification of words. Emphasis is on verbs that describe reality not as physical objects (where subjects act upon objects) but as transitory occurrences — like ‘a meal occurs’ — or longer lived — like ‘shelter occurs’. The result ‘delineates’ the Nootka notion of reality, distinguishing it from others’. It is in the context of this rather expansive view of language that Noam Chomsky, the American linguist, is surely right in saying:

‘A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language’.

Extending this theme, of tying together usage and perspective, in some languages there is no front, back, left, and right; instead, there is north, south, east, or west of something — a geographical kind of view of place. Two languages with just such a sense of location and cardinal direction are Guugu Yimithirr, which is an aboriginal language from Australia, and Sambali, spoken in a province of the Philippines. Another example entails agency for an accidental action: ‘Sebastian, the lead lab scientist, dropped the test tube’ (agency pinpointed, as in English) versus ‘The test tube dropped’ (agency hidden, as in Japanese). These rich differences among languages have implications that ripple across society, affecting, for example, values, norms, law, economics, and political policy.

We might argue that the plasticity of language — and the consequential differences in how language, over time, shapes our understanding of reality — affects how the mind distinguishes between fact and fiction. This observation hints at the subjectivity associated with postmodernism in defining the truth and falsity of perceived reality — at least in a linguistic context. In this view, a subjectively conscious reality — differing among the native speakers of diverse languages — and the external world do not intersect, or if they do, it is but imperfectly.

As such, purported knowledge, understanding, and belief are likely to be contested among partisan cultures, each embracing its own conventions regarding how the mind might describe the world. Writing in the mid-20th century, Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida pointed to this issue of defensively shielding one’s own language, saying:

‘No one gets angry at . . . someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather with someone who tampers with your own language’.

And yet, with Derrida’s cautionary words in mind, whose truth and falsity is it? And whose perspective is valid, or at least the most valid (that is, the least flawed)? Does it come down to simply a catalogue of rules for usage prescribed within each community speaking and writing a particular language? Perhaps J.L. Austin got it right in opining, ‘Sentences are not as such either true or false’.

Perhaps, too, it is as Humpty Dumpty famously declared in Lewis Carroll’s book, Through the Looking Glass, when he said:

‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less’.

That’s not too far off from the latest thinking about language, actually. Why so? It’s not only that different languages seem to lead to a different knowledge, understanding, and experience of reality within the mind. Rather, the effects of language seem more granular than that: Users within each of the world’s thousands of languages have different understanding of reality than even their fellow native speakers of those languages.

There are thus two levels of reality in the mind’s eye: one based on shared languages, such as Norwegian, Khmer, and Maori. And one based on individuals within each language group whose personalised understanding and application of language uniquely and subtly differs from one person to another — quite apart from the differences in how, as individuals, we stamp our customs and norms on language.

Monday, 12 November 2018

Last week saw President Trump throwing out a CNN reporter from the White House Press Pool for disagreeing with him about ‘the facts’.

CNN called it an attack on press freedom, but the collective response from other journalists has been muted. And no wonder, because these days the press are themselves heavily into ‘denying’ certain views. We've all heard about ‘Climate deniers’ and how evil they are, but this last month saw a vehement attack on Cholesterol deniers!

Sarah Boseley, longtime health editor of the supposedly liberal UK newspaper, The Guardian, launched the attack with a piece called:

‘A group of scientists has been challenging everything we know about cholesterol, saying we should eat fat and stop taking statins. This is not just bad science – it will cost lives, say experts’.

The back story is that The Guardian, has often seemed to look fondly on the pharmaceutical industry and regularly promotes the case for expensive drugs and mocks campaigners. Its longtime medical writer, Ben Goldacre, under the heading we just saw reused by Ms Bosely of ‘bad science’, regularly wrote in favour of Big Pharma and against alternative medicine let alone common-sense approaches without ever declaring his own links. There were family links as well as a career one via the Institute of Psychiatry to many of the industries favoured by the arguments in his articles.

‘Big Phama’, firms like Unilever; SmithKline Beecham and Pfizer Limited (two producers of antidepressant drugs); Novartis Pharmaceuticals (previously Ceiba Geigy); Lilly Industries Ltd (the manufacturers of Prozac); Hoescht Marion Roussell; GlaxoSmithKline (vaccine manufacturers) … and so on smiled on his work. Goldacre even received an award for ‘science journalism’ in 2003 - the award that year being sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline.

It’s enough to make you cynical, as is the fact that in the early years of 2000, the Institute of Psychiatry held over 200 research grants with an annual value of around £14.5 million. Its second highest source of funding was the pharmaceutical industry. The Institute is part of King’s College London, and part of the UK’s public education system. Yet for all the money the public devotes to universities, and for all the special status of university academics, private money like this drives research findings.

But back to butter, and the new money-spinner today is prescribing drugs called statins in order to reduce cholesterol. Justin Smith estimated in a piece for Statin Nation that the market for these drugs was more than $19 billion and rising. In The Guardian piece, Ms. Boseley says ‘statins are out of patent and therefore no longer make money for the companies that originally put them on the market’.

Note those ‘weasel words’, ‘for the companies that originally put them on the market’.

I looked at the cholesterol debate - I could hardly NOT do - in my food book published this month*. It is (chemically speaking) a very 'complex' area (all diet things seem to be when you get into them), but there are some studies that can be talked about in a broader sense, including several iconic long-term studies of low-cholesterol diets which do seem to demonstrate:

(a) that it is effectively impossible to isolate one factor in a dietary study, (alteration of one factor disguises changes in other factors too) and

(b) in as much as it is possible, not only that there is no evidence to support the 'low cholesterol diet' approach, there are indications that it might actually increase the risk of heart disease!

The Guardian piece makes little attempt to present a 'debate' but instead offers the view that there is an argument for refusing to give cholesterol-deniers a platform, just as some will no longer debate with climate change sceptics. The position is summed up by one of Prof Rory Collins of Oxford University, a professor of epidemiology who says quite unashamedly that by cholesterol deniers he means people who dispute the claim that diets high in cholesterol are dangerous for heart health. As Sarah Boseley puts it here, these are people saying butter is safe and statins are dangerous. BAD PEOPLE!

No real evidence is actually offered in the piece, and when I asked Ms. Boseley for any background studies she might have used, she did not respond to the request.

In fact, the available evidence is very different. One small study of Australian men found swapping from butter to margarine, for example, found the death rate from heart disease went up amongst the margarine eaters. Another study, in Denmark, that put people on a low-salt diet precisely to protect heart health, found that perversely it led to cholesterol levels shooting up!

Surveying the research, some 20 years ago now, Dr Laura Corr a cardiologist at Guys Hospital in London concluded that :

‘The commonly-held belief that the best diet for prevention of coronary heart disease is a low saturated fat, low cholesterol diet is not supported by the available evidence from clinical trials"

However, seven years ago, an influential meta-analysis by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists found that:

In 2015, another systemic review by researchers from various international institutions in Japan, Sweden, UK, Ireland, US and Italy, published in the BMJ, insisted that - on the contrary! - as LDL cholesterol went down, all-cause mortality went up while higher levels of ‘bad ’ were apparently linked to living longer.

Don’t ask for new studies, as there have been so many, and yet analysis of what they prove remains completely partisan. It has been noted that the actual trial data held by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists’ Collaboration on behalf of the industry sponsor has not been made available to other researchers, despite multiple requests over many years.

Since then, rather than demonstrate their case through persuasive research, advocates of the low-fat, low-cholesterol diets have sought to shut-down debate even trailing that new term cholesterol deniers...

After reading all the evidence, my feeling is that cholesterol levels are not simple, one dimensional values to be turned up or down like a thermostat and attempts to shoehorn it into a Manichean (good / evil) view of dietary factors risks actually harming human health. Attempts by governments and media to rule definitively on it are unwise and a distraction from practical steps that can be taken.

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